I got a gem of a fundraising letter from Nikki Haley wringing its hands over leftist “bullies” (9 times) and anti-freedom leftist “mobs” (32 times). So, if I love my country, I should donate to its right-wing summer camp-thing for college students.
Too many howlers to list, and its plumply redundant 8 pages could be cut to a page and a half and lose nothing but its rubber mallet repetition. The best phrase:
“And you and I must stand up to all who bully and oppress.”
Ah, yes. The Republican party, its numbers shrinking, lost the popular vote for President 6 of the last 7 elections, openly reliant on gerrymandering and voter suppression and the undemocratic Electoral College to hold to power. Yet it holds the White House, Senate, and Supreme Court. Always put-upon, always whining it’s oppressed. And Trump, who bullies and bitches and preaches for uprisings against political rivals every day.
I’m not a fan of the Democratic party establishment. Its leadership is also too concerned with holding institutional power and refuses to make changes, that most citizens support, that help regular people because those changes would irk corporate donors. They love the professional class and also make kissy faces to Wall Street at our expense.
But, really, with Trump and the Republicans controlling three of four centers of Federal power (used to be all four), jailing peaceful protestors, giving detained asylum seekers and immigrants involuntary hysterectomies, shooting at the media and moms, proudly spreading virus — who’s being the bully and oppressor?
Wasn’t Melania going to rid us all of bullying? She done with that yet?
Donald Trump is a bullshitter and decades-long con man, and much (but not most) of the country fell for it. How to bring people who voted for him around? “Expose and educate.” Create a place for them to go when they realize Trump and his Administration doesn’t give a shit about them, and never did.
The press takes [Donald Trump] literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally. – Salena Zito, The Atlantic, September 23, 2016
I feel as if this is a vote against the future, and the future is going to happen anyway. – Gloria Steinem, WNYC Interview, November 9, 2016
Trump loves the flag, prays over his loins.
Trump’s mindset can change at a whim, but he’s already telling people in his “Thank you” post-election rallies that he was never serious about jailing Clinton, or “draining the swamp”. He was bullshitting them. The Daily Show covered this well.
Trump’s brief political career has been based on racism, sexism, and claiming to be anti-Establishment. His team is almost entirely Establishment people, even worse, C and D-listers in the Establishment. Scrubs so low-rent that even the George W. Bush Administration would likely ignore them.
Not all Trump voters are sexist or racist, but all sexists and racists voted for Trump. What about reaching out to the other people? People who have some amount of sense, but got tricked or are “low-info” or ignorant about national matters?
Sam Harris had a good discussion with Paul Bloom, Psychology Professor at Yale. Among the many good points worth listening to, Bloom said that people may support “Building a wall” or “Lock her up” or a Muslim registry not as a serious point, but as a values signifier. Meaning they don’t think of it with any depth, it’s a quick statement they can make that shows they are “Boo… to Obama” or “Boo… to Hillary”. In short, people may be irrational on national or international matters, but more sensible on local matters, or on a personal level. Say, at a town meeting having to do with funding roads they may find more in common with other people along the political spectrum, that they have given the local matter more thought, than when they yell or smile at chants of “Lock her up!”
Longtime Bill Clinton campaign strategist James Carville had a mantra at a recent event shown on BookTV. (He opened by asking the crowd: “How many people are scared? How many people are very scared? Well, you’re not scared enough! It’s a disaster! Our President-Elect doesn’t know the first thing about the first thing.”) His mantra: “Expose and educate.”
Carville points out that the Trump/Pence Administration will have a lot of power, and will run roughshod, but do not have the power of the will of the people. And that is what we need to build up.
There will likely be times when we don’t have the ability to talk things out first, we need to fight first to protect people. Maybe we need to sign ourselves up for the Muslim registry, along with Muslims. Maybe we need to tell an empowered racist to shut the fuck up in person at the J.C. Penny store when she yells at Latinas (or better still, ignore the racist and express support to the people being picked on).
But realize that George W. Bush left office the least popular President in the 70 years it had been measured (22% approval rating). And that came after he won the popular vote in 2004 (maybe, Ohio votes were a scandal). Many Bush voters came to dislike the person they voted for. Expose & educate. Many Trump voters will be slow, but may come around to disliking the bullshitter con man they voted for. Expose the public to what is happening. Educate them on what to do with that knowledge to raise hell to effect needed changes. Do more than post on Facebook. That will build more people power, people power needed to balance & battle against the Establishment elites running the Trump White House.
I want to see this movie in Harlem so I can talk at the screen the whole time.
It’s not impossible that Ashton Kutcher could do well in this role. He has intelligence and savvy beneath his goofball persona. I don’t trust screenwriters to get the technology and the personalities right. The trailer below does not inspire confidence:
They command you to put that colored dust on yourself before watching this movie.
Josh Gad (the shlubby Elder Cunningham from Book of Mormon) plays Steve Wozniak. That casting looks bad. Wozniak is a person who has hardly aged the last 40 years. Why not have him play himself, and treat ‘Jobs’ as a weird fantasia? Make THAT movie, guys!
I’ve read many books about Jobs and Apple, went to the same college (Reed) that Jobs attended for only one or two semesters (I went for TWO years, thankuverymuch), and watched several documentaries about the days of the Homebrew Club and Xerox PARC and Apple and NeXT and Microsoft. Documentaries suit those stories, especially interviews with the people who were there.
How do you make compelling drama out of pear-shaped men anguishing over gadgets and doo-dads? Or, Athene help us, operating systems?
How do you beat a clip like the real Jobs, below? He’s talking in 1996 (Windows 95 had just been released), about a dozen years after getting kicked out of Apple for being an asshole by CEO John Sculley. Jobs is still more than a year away from working his way back into Apple, but he can’t help himself from getting an important dig into Microsoft. I watch this clip a few times a year and LOVE it long time:
Luke Skywalker had Darth Vader, Maggie Simpson has the Baby with One Eyebrow. My nemesis is these little danglers off the ceiling fan in the condo in Arizona we’re staying in. My head hits these as I pass 10+ times a day. Apparently, I’m not trainable as it keeps happening. They’re winning.
Samsung ads/links/suggestions have been all up in my Facebook feed the last few weeks. This already had me at a “Fuck off, Samsung” state of mind. Now it has shown up as a Twitter suggestion similar to Salman Rushdie. I’m not seeing it. Is “Samsung” some sort of trigger word meant to break me out of a spell or summon me from a virtual reality, and I’m not responding?
I’d declare a fatwa on Samsung, but then the “similar to” claim would be a validated prophecy. So, I’m sticking with wanting Samsung to downshift its sponsored links stuff.
After 6th grade I went to a summer camp on the University of Oregon campus where we stayed in dorms for two weeks. Outside our dorm was a squirrel who checked on us, even on the 2nd floor. We named him Fred. For all I know, more than 30 years on Fred is doing fine. Not so this fellow. Alas.
Tick tick tick tick. What? Whatever. Groggy. Tap tap tap tap. For real? Ugh. Tap TAP tap TAP. What is IT? Through the hole a prim petite redhead in a company issued suit stands with a cranky keyboard, fidgets, irritated by the course of her day. I’ve no idea. Angry knuckles reach out to just beneath view. KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK. No way I’ll make her day worse by subjecting her to my throttled-down lucidity. Ignore. Another round? Knock knock knock knock. After this, bet it’ll be done. Done.
Each day I walk past the cubicle you were in. I think of you every day, but some days, and those days are increasing, I don’t think of you each time I walk by.
It’s not the first space you were in, but at least the third here. For diplomacy that of course seems stupid now, but merely dopey then, I convinced you to move from the previous spot to this one.
I miss your lamentations about the latest groaner emails. Your laughter at times with sunshine, other time with rue, once in a while with malice. And some times with victory and happiness, or a mix of it all.
We packed your things the first day we were all back. Mournful, needing breaks. Lots of laughter. Lots of wit, even in your workplace residue.
Even after two workplace piques of protest where you hauled a lot of the clutter in your workplace away, your workplace still had a lot of clutter. Not from compulsion of needing every damn thing in a series of things, but what you thought was funny, object designs you admired. Same as your brain. Packed with memories and trivia and delight and revulsion at the aesthetics of things.
We each each nabbed a few things of yours to hold and be reminded, or things that simply made us laugh. Now that space is blah and boring, and someday will be filled with someone else. Better to have known and lost. And the loss is getting easier, but it’s still not fair.
